


November

by VivWiley



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Unrequited
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-15
Updated: 2013-04-15
Packaged: 2017-12-08 13:27:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/761840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VivWiley/pseuds/VivWiley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>What is the late November doing</i><br/>With the disturbance of the spring...<br/>It was not (to start again) what one had expected.
</p>
<p>
  <i> ...the pattern is new in every moment</i><br/>And every moment is a new and shocking<br/>Valuation of all we have been.   - T. S. Eliot, East Coker
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Skinner finds himself in a grey season.</p>
            </blockquote>





	November

**Author's Note:**

> This is a companion piece to February
> 
> Disclaimer: The characters and situations of the X-Files are the property of 1013 Productions and Fox Broadcasting. No infringement is intended.
> 
> Set after "Amor Fati"
> 
> Thanks, as always, to Meredith the Magnificent and Beneficent

Nothing is substantial in a November landscape. Grey early morning fog rises up out of the ground, obscuring objects in the far and middle distances. Blurring the edges of leaf-stripped branches, until trees are nothing but half-seen skeletons marching through a no-man's land.

Time itself is insubstantial in November; suspended between the end of Fall and the beginning of winter. Lost between the defined moments of Labor Day--Summer's end--and those endless mocking times known as the "holidays."

In November there is no escape from yourself. Nowhere to run, nowhere to go that isn't shrouded in shadow and fog and grey. You are lost in haze with no points of reference. No way to get your bearing. No compass. There is only you and the endless grey, until you are no longer sure where you end and the mist begins.

 

He was tired of his half-life.

It was a reflection of how weary--worn-down--he was that even the scenery seemed to be conspiring to remind him of how little there was left of who he had been.

A sudden brutal autumn had changed the leaves on all the trees in the course of a single weekend, and then the next week stripped the branches bare in a casual display of unfeeling power. The trees were turned to hangman's gallows in seemingly deserted landscapes. Empty stages waiting for imminent death. Populated by ghosts, and the promise of ghosts. He dwelled all too easily in that grey blankness.

Skeletons. Ghosts. Shadows. He was surprised, at this stage of his life, to find himself haunted. If he were going to be wraith-ridden, he would have expected it earlier. In another country, after a different death. But maybe it didn't really matter what he called it. He knew there was nothing left of him but this strange half-life. It was not so much, he realized, that he was haunted, but that he himself had become one of the ghosts. A part of the fog. He had been reduced to a specter--visible, but intangible. A presence on the landscape that could only be seen, but could no longer act or take part in the events that swirled past him.

He knew it was partly his own choice, of course, but that did not lessen the bitterness. During the frantic chase to save Mulder during his mysterious and near-fatal illness, Skinner had scarcely recognized himself. He was horrified by his indecision, the swings of mood and purpose that seemed to grip him. One moment he was blindly tracking down Kritschgau, driven solely by a desperate need to do something--anything--to help Mulder, and then he found himself doubting Kritschgau, questioning the use of the drug that he had seen was the only thing to make any discernible difference in Mulder's condition. He had become the wavering Washington bureaucrat that was such a cliche and that he despised so deeply.

It sickened him to realize that Mulder knew he was compromised. Yet at the same time, there was a strange relief in it. A slight momentary easing of the burden of that knowledge. Only momentary. He was terrified of what it might mean if Mulder survived. Would Mulder's knowledge of Krycek's hold on Skinner then endanger Mulder as well? He wanted to deny Mulder's statement, even as he knew it was pointless to try.

Then events moved forward with a sickening velocity and he had reacted in ways that did not, on reflection, do him much credit. He resolutely refused to think about his reactions to Agent Fowley discovering him and Kritschgau in Mulder's room.

There had been one instant of clarity. A brief lifting of the haze that seemed to have enveloped him. The confrontation with Scully in his office right after her return from Africa had been a moment of revelation. Faced with her burning certainty, he'd been humbled, recalled for those moments to the purpose of what they were trying to accomplish: to save Mulder and to salvage what they could from the insane game that trapped them all.

He found himself once more confessing to her. Assuming responsibility for a situation that he still didn't understand.  
Trying to explain involving the dubious Kritschgau in all this. Wanting more than anything some small measure of understanding from her. Some absolution that he also understood he did not deserve. Could not even ask for. He did not expect her, really, to be his absolver, but she reminded him that absolute commitment was possible.

Her clarity was contagious. So when Mulder disappeared, Skinner had finally realized there was now only one path for him. He had to step aside entirely. Had to distance himself publicly and privately from the investigation. Had to let events run, and let Scully and Mulder play out the end game without him. His presence, his involvement would only jeopardize them both. It was the thing he wanted least of all. But there had been no real choice for him. He'd had to let go.

His stark announcement to Scully that it was better if he not know what she and Mulder were doing or where they were had left him feeling as though he had run a marathon. Breathless, shaky. It felt like an act of physical labor. It felt like the final break from what was left of his living world. It was the only option he had.

The pain of Krycek's on-going torment had made him weary and stupid. Had forced him into making conspicuous gestures. To call attention to himself and his seeming neutrality. Some might call it brash--his public and visible distancing of himself from Mulder and Scully --but he recognized stupidity when he saw it. He'd been a bureaucrat long enough.

He'd had to break this final tie because he was being broken.

Since he'd infected him, Krycek had been unable to refrain from using the controls to the nanites in Skinner's blood. Unable to resist showing up at odd hours and simply using the control for a moment or two or twenty--inflicting excruciating and uncontrollable pain on Skinner and then vanishing again, always with the warning that, "I'll be back--when you least expect it." A childish taunt that under any other circumstances might have amused Skinner. Only there was nothing amusing about this. And there was a never a time now when he didn't expect Krycek.

The inflicted pain was always a surprise somehow. A fresh agony that left him gasping and reeling for hours afterward. The echoing white-orange shocks of torment ghosting along his veins and skin, finally melting away, leaving only a vague nausea and a fading resolve that next time he would be able to bear it.

How do you learn to bear the unbearable? It was the sort of question that he tended to avoid--an existential riddle of the type that seemed to keep Mulder endlessly occupied, but which had so little entertainment value in the very real and concrete situation that ensnared him. Time was when the pain of his healing wounds from Vietnam had been the closest approximation to a living hell that he thought he would ever encounter. He'd been wrong.

It infuriated him that he couldn't control his reaction to the pain. Couldn't learn to overcome these mere microscopic things in his blood. He even considered doing some research into how POWs had survived torture during various wars, and finally dismissed the idea as something that was too analytical even for him, and also as something that would provide far too much food for amusement to Krycek.

There were other worries. Skinner could feel his boundaries beginning to blur, to break down. He was losing the sense of his shape. He no longer knew what exactly defined him, what contained him. Except the pain. It seemed to him that eventually there would be nothing left of him but some mindless husk of reaction. He wondered what Krycek would do with him once he had been completely broken. It frightened him only a little to realize that he wasn't sure he cared.

And then Krycek was abruptly gone. Skinner had been left alone, ever since Mulder's return and cure. Or had it been a cure and return? Skinner had not asked for the details, simply signed the paperwork to reactivate the team. Skinner hadn't seen Krycek since the day Scully had almost caught the bastard in Skinner's office. Since the day Scully had found him nearly on his knees--wrecked against the unyielding neutrality of his desk. Victim to the whim and will of his former agent. She'd questioned him about the encounter, afterward. Had tried to get him to go to the hospital for tests, for rest, for examination, all of which Skinner steadfastly refused, until his stubborn and terse denials of her requests had ended in her retreat. He had not been in a mood to celebrate his victory over her persistence.

He had been left alone in the shadows. Waiting for the next call, the next spark of agony. Waiting. But for weeks now there had been no sign of Krycek. It was not reassuring. Simply wearing.

As November turned colder and greyer this year, he found himself for once unable to ignore the approaching winter. He couldn't shrug off the encroaching cold and advancing frozen stillness. As the ice feathered across his windows in the mornings, he could feel his blood growing colder, more frozen. Even in the absence of Krycek, Skinner could feel those things in his blood growing colder. Growing stronger. Freezing more and more of him away.

His work was still there. It was all that contained him anymore. A boundary. A definition. He was an Assistant Director. He pushed the appropriate papers. Signed the correct forms, and attended meetings. It wasn't exactly a purpose. But it was familiar.

So little else remained. Late one night he'd found himself down at the Vietnam Memorial. Surprised to find himself standing in that granite V. He'd been startled by his own image caught on the polished black, staring back at a man he barely recognized. There had been a time when he'd been more comfortable there than anywhere else--safest, somehow, among the phantoms of his past. Lost in the history that had driven him for so long. But now he no longer belonged there. The Wall was a place for the living to meet and remember the dead. The half-dead had no business there. Skinner had turned his back on the memorial, and had not returned.

It was not just that he had been forced to the sidelines due to Krycek's control over him. It was the guilt. The knowledge that he had not done all that he should have, while he had the chance. That he had allowed himself to be forced out of the game. That he had failed to act when he should have.

He'd tried to tell Scully at the hospital when he'd nearly died, when he had died after Krycek first infected him. He'd been thrust into the game by the shadow puppet masters 5 years ago. At first an unwitting pawn, it had taken him far too long to figure out which side he belonged on. And even then, he'd acted too slowly. Too cautiously. He'd taken stands along the way--but often too late; or in causes lost before they had begun. He could not bring himself to regret his deal with the smoking man to bargain for a cure for Scully's cancer. But he was far too aware that it had been a quixotic gesture at best.

He saw now exactly how short life was. How few chances there were to take action. He had failed in that regard, he thought. He carried his culpability with him like a dark smudge on his soul. An underlying ache beneath the sharper pain of the torment inflicted by Krycek.

November trudged on, and Skinner felt himself disappearing into the fog, a little more each day.

It had been a day much like every other day this November. Grey, overcast, a lingering fog that muted the already hushed landscape. On the drive to work that morning, he'd felt a nearly overwhelming urge to just keep driving. To take a different exit and to drive until there was no more road. Drive until he fell off the edge of the world, into a nameless void that would swallow him whole and complete his transformation into nothingness.

He arrived at work on time.

An unremarkable day for a senior manager in a Federal agency. Meetings, memos, more meetings, and a brief period of time during which he actually attempted to complete the work that had been piling up all week. The words of his colleagues in the meeting, and on the paper of the memos he read flowed past him in a meaningless blur of sound and shape. What meaning does language have to a ghost? What does it matter that the travel regulations have changed if the only place you are going is to an afterlife that is all-too-probably hell?

When he could no longer pretend that he was doing anything besides moving papers from one orderly stack to another on his desk, he went down and worked out in the Bureau gym-- running the miles on the treadmill, lifting the weights, absently nodding to the various young agents who tried to get his attention. In a moment of wry humor, of which there had been few lately, he wondered if all the young field agents trying oh-so-casually to be noticed by him, a senior manager, had any idea of how excruciatingly boring it was to be a senior manager. That if they had any sense they would all bail out now and take up careers in a far more exciting field--like data entry.

On the drive home, he began considering what to do about dinner and discarded the thought partly-formed. Food had even less appeal than usual lately. Like so many other nights, he thought he would just crash on his couch--staring at the inane white noise on the TV, until it seemed reasonable to retire to his bed, so that he could stare at the ceiling.

As he opened the door to his apartment, though, he immediately recognized that something was off. Some extra-sensory warning had him coiled and ready to react as he crossed his threshold.

There was someone in his living room. His hand automatically began reaching for his weapon, a gesture dropped before it was completed. A half-recognized acknowledgment of the futility of trying to protect himself at least in that way, or perhaps of his lack of desire to do so anymore.

It was, unbelievably, Scully. She was standing at the far end of his living room. She'd turned on a small corner lamp that barely cut the gloom, but provided just enough illumination that he could see her features. His relief that it wasn't Krycek was quickly replaced with a stinging incredulity.

"What are you doing here?" Sharp, to the point. Unsure of what emotion he was feeling. He thought briefly of asking her how she'd gotten in, and decided that he really didn't want to know. It was enough, for the moment, that she was there.

"Waiting for you." Her tone was calm, but he heard something else underneath.

"Why?" Still tight, terse. He closed the door behind him and unceremoniously dumped his briefcase, keys and coat on the floor.

"I'm...worried about you." She made a subtle movement, almost as though she'd intended to walk toward him, but instead subsided into stillness again. The gulf of carpet and sterile, generic furniture yawned between them.

"I don't need anyone to watch out for me. I'm fine." He wished vaguely that he didn't sound quite so gruff, but seemed unable to find any other tone.

She was so terrifyingly complete--her external shell smooth and perfect. He had almost never seen her without that masking in place, without her sure facade of control. Just once or twice while trying to protect or save Mulder, and one night in February that he had almost come to believe had been a dream; something he had conjured out of his imagination.

"I didn't say I was watching out for you. I was just waiting for you. Waiting to make sure you got home ok. That you were safe." Her tone was level, but her gaze hinted at a warmth that he couldn't afford to see.

He made an impatient gesture and took a step into the room, stopping as he realized that he wasn't sure where he was going.

"You haven't been yourself lately..." a pause during which he could hear the "sir" she did not voice. "You passed me twice in the hallways today and you didn't see me." Another pause during which he thought she was weighing her words carefully. "You seem shadowed. Like you're carrying some...weight."

He couldn't control the bark of laughter. "Shadowed? That's a bit melodramatic." The words were wry, nearly sarcastic, but he was desperately afraid she could hear the underlying uncertainty.

She watched him in the silence of the room, her head slightly to one side, as though analyzing particularly problematic data.

He tried again. Tone level, calm. "What are you doing here, Scully? Is Mulder..."

She cut him off impatiently. "This has nothing to do with him. I'm...I'm worried about you."

The care in her voice was more than he could bear. She was treating him so carefully, almost as though he were fragile. He had to move, had to break the contact with her gaze.

He brushed past her to stand staring unseeingly out the window. "It's not your place..."

For the first time, a spark of something almost like anger in her voice. "We've been through this before. I am your doctor...I have been your doctor. I am your colleague. I am your friend. You have been...." The spark flickered. "You have been very important to me." So softly he could almost not hear her. 

The memory of that night assaulted him again. The images pressing and tumbling through his mind, pushing aside the petty cares of the day, and even the darker pain that he carried. He found himself breathing suddenly shallower, more rapidly. He hoped the night dark room and the distance between them would disguise the reaction.

Too many times he had asked himself what that night had meant to her. It had been, he understood, out of character for her. And yet, he also knew that it had been something that she had wanted and needed as much as he had wanted and needed it. He knew that she had no regrets.

Leaving her that night had been one of the most difficult things he'd ever done, but he understood that staying through the night was impossible.

For some time after that February night--he'd seen a quiet warmth in the depths of her eyes. Clearly not an invitation, but a quiet acknowledgment of a shared moment.

What he shied away from was any examination of what that night had meant to him. Was afraid to examine the meaning. Wasn't sure he could bring himself to face and understand what that night had meant.

He could hear her moving behind him. Could sense her coming up to stand behind him. Close, but not touching. He fancied he could feel the heat of her body reaching out to wrap around him; he was suddenly aware of the subtle scent of her in the apartment.

"I asked you once who watched for you to make sure that you are safe at night. I'm asking again. Are you safe? What can I..."

He couldn't bear it anymore. "Don't ask that, Scully." His voice dropping to a lower, rougher register. "Please, don't ask that."

Her soft, sharp inhalation of breath behind him was followed by a silence that stifled thought and logic and reason. He concentrated on stillness. On control.

Her hand on his shoulder almost compelled him to turn around, but he waited as it slid gently down his arm, until her fingers reached his hand, twining with his fingers. Holding on. He felt her lean her face against his back for a moment.

Still holding his hand, she answered him quietly. "Ok, I won't ask. I'm sor--" She bit off the apology half-completed. Understanding him well enough to know that it was not what he wanted to hear.

They waited in the half-light of the living room for a long time. Then she untangled her fingers and moved to stand in front of him, capturing his reluctant gaze. Seeming to look through him for a moment, her lucid eyes reading him as easily as a child's primer.

"It hasn't stopped has it? He hasn't stopped." Not really a question.

"No."

"And there's nothing..."

"No."

He wondered briefly if she would accept such absolutes from Mulder.

She kept watching him, weighing and measuring, until she gave a tiny nod. She seemed to be struggling with a question. He waited patiently, time had no meaning in this strange hour.

"Is there an end?"

He wasn't sure if she was asking if he thought he would die soon, or if Krycek had demanded something specific. He answered both questions. "I don't know."

She reached out and took his hand again. Her fingers were unexpectedly cool against his skin. "You don't have to wait alone." She moved another step toward him. Their bodies now almost touching and he could smell her and feel her real and dangerous heat, and he was so greedy for that fire. For her touch.

But he stepped back, his soul protesting every millimeter of distance that he imposed between them. He gently disengaged his hand from hers, thrusting both hands into his pockets to disguise the subtle tremor that shook them. He could feel the small machines in his blood, clicking and rattling through his veins.

"Yes. I do. It's the only safe way."

"For whom?" She respected the distance he put between them, but he could see that a part of her longed to cross it. He ruthlessly tamped down his reaction.

"For me. For you. For Mulder. For all of us." The truth, stark and cold, knifed through the room.

She started to ask "Why?" but he could see her discard the word before it was fully vocalized. He realized that an intense respect for each other's privacy had become a hallmark of their relationship over the years.

Instead she began, "Let me s--"

"No!" He cut her off, not wanting to hear the offer she was about to make. Afraid that if he let her speak it that he would have no power to refuse it.

She froze into a breathless stillness that chilled him. He wondered if she would simply turn on her heel and get the hell out of his apartment. Her eyes never wavered, though. Out of nowhere, he suddenly remembered over-hearing Mulder teasing her once about being the "enigmatic Dr. Scully." He was pinned motionless by her gaze.

In the absolute silence that fell over the apartment, he could hear his refrigerator suddenly start and hum, a tiny rattle of normalcy that seemed dangerously out of place.

Finally she gave the tiniest smile, a hint only, and walked quietly toward him. Standing just inside his boundaries, she raised both her hands to his shoulders and tugged him gently down, and he bowed, powerless in her hands. She framed his face with her fingers, and pressed her lips gently over his mouth. He fell into a light-filled maelstrom of heat and sweetness and clarity. Unable to stop himself, he gathered her into his body, cradling her closer, allowing his hands to rove her frame.

For endless moments, he lost himself to their kiss, their connection. But in the end, of course, he felt the darkness closing back in. The inescapable reality of his situation. Of who they were. Of what they were.

He drew back from her slowly, and realized that she was not particularly surprised. She simply waited, lips damp and slightly parted, an open warmth in her eyes. He wanted to pull her back into his arms and to lead them up the stairs to his bedroom and to tumble headlong with her into the hot, light, brilliant place that occupied such a careful place in his memory.

He stepped back, and then back again, until he could feel the chill November air separating them.

She gave an odd sigh, and straightened herself. Biting her lower lip, she closed her eyes for a second. Then meeting his gaze for the last time that night, she graced him with a strange, unreadable ghost of a smile. "You're not alone. You may wait alone, but you are not alone."

Then she walked out of his apartment, the door closing so quietly behind her that he barely heard the bolt catching.

The next morning he was out running along the Potomac. Another fall fog had settled on the area. Rising off the iron-grey waters of the river, obscuring familiar landmarks, causing him to lose all sense of direction and distance.

His thoughts were drawn back to the night before. He found himself caught in a momentary wave of sharp regret. It could have ended differently. It should have ended differently. But he stopped that thought. It could not have ended anyway but as it did. No matter what he wanted, he understood the limits. Understood, fundamentally, who he was, who she was.

He lingered for a moment over the memory of the kiss. And then put it aside. She had used physical touch, he knew, to pierce his barriers. To let him know the truth behind her assertion that he was not alone. To remind him, it seemed, of his connection to the physical world. For the first time in months, he realized, he wasn't aware of the things in his blood. There was just his working body, the legs pumping, the arms swinging, the boundaries of himself.

As he ran through the fog, there was only the path beneath his feet, leading him to a destination that he knew, but could not see. And in the concealing mist, he wondered if the destination was there at all. He could only survive and move through the moment--he could not presume to know what was ahead. He ran on heedless of anything but the path, the journey.

END


End file.
